Tail -f is dead, long live tail -f

We’ve all been there – test some new code, tail your logs, test some more new code, tail the logs some more… But lets face it with so many cool SAAS solutions for managing your systems who want’s to be hanging around on the command line these days??? Ok I’m being facetious and I know the command line is still as powerful as ever, however you really shouldn’t have to switch from your logging solution – which comes with all those nice features such as searching, alerting, graphing etc. – to the command line every time you want to tail your logs.

So why do so many log management solutions ignore the ability to tail your logs or to get a live feed of what your most recent system events are? As our all time greatest ever feature request – we took the hint from our users and decided to invest some time in implementing this feature. We’ve just released what we call our ‘live feed’ in beta (i.e. ‘tail -f’ for all you command liners out there), so check it out and tell us what you think – and we want to hear your thoughts whether you think its good, bad or ugly…

Our new live feed allows you to:

View your most recent log events in real time.

Any tagged events are highlighted so you can easily see, in real time, errors, warnings, signups, payments … or whatever events you have tags configured for.

If you see something of interest – pause our live feed – this allows you to scroll back up through the most recent events to inspect events or search across them for keywords.

Carry out live filtering (see screenshot below). You can use the search bar to specify a keyword or pattern that you want to filter for. This means that only those events that contain the search term will be shown in your live feed. This is a great way to identify the needle in the haystack when you are tailing your logs under high log volume.

Filtering live data

Our live feed feature gives you all the capabilities of your traditional tail -f and a lot more logging goodness! And all without having to switch between the command line and your logging solution. So as you can see… tail -f is dead…. long live (a new enhanced) tail -f !!!